Skraping
by Krin
Summary: Short one shot answering the question, "what did Rayn do for fun (before inheriting a huge crime syndicate)?" Occurs right after the events of Jak X.


**This fic was written as an exercise to answer the question, "what does Rayn do for fun?"**

**This takes place shortly after Jak X. I wrote out most of this fic in 2010 but never put it up. Finally decided to finish it in preparation for (hopefully) writing more fics in 2014. So, like, hi! I think I haven't put a fic up in 5 years. I missed you, J&D fanfic. I wrote this with the 90s in mind: the stereotypical "awesome!" catchphrases, the street games, the skater culture, etc. There are also brief mentions of a couple other characters... Enjoy this little Rayn one shot! **

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Very few people understood that Kras was not a city. It was many cities, each with its own ecosystem. It was a mean city at street level, with buildings and people and fast food and narcotics. It was a canopy city, where gangs fought airspace wars on the rooftops. It was a basement city, where the sewer gangs and underground racers collided.

Even fewer people knew that clinging under all those cities was a wilderness.

The new ruler of Kras hunched over her desk, tapping a wooden hair stick against her lips. Rayn flipped through files and print outs. Numbers were the inky blood of this beast; they detailed what gangs were where, making how much on what product. Betting boards and bookies and laundromats and profits and cost of illicit goods sold and-

Rayn glanced at the clock on the wall. It was an ornate thing with moving pieces; a crystal sun below the meridian and a full moon rising, inlaid with pearl. In the window beyond, the real moon hung behind apartment buildings and smoke stacks, outshone by neon lights.

She sniffed. The filtered air in her office was a luxury. It was pure, without a hint of pollution. It made her throat hurt. She glanced down again at the papers detailing Razer's asset merger proposal and inwardly groaned.

"That's quite enough of that," said Rayn, setting the papers aside in a neat pile. She took a few deep breaths and thought of the layers of the city, and in particular, its literal, bottom-line potential...

She made her way over to the closet that she always kept locked. Her old things were here; the clothing and toys and objects that shaped her childhood.

Rayn unlocked the door and surveyed the mess inside. Here were her dolls, her first calculator and ledgers, and a diary with a heart on the cover she had long since resolved to never open again. She shoved a few boxes around. More dolls, textbooks, reports she had written for her father. Business magazines, old clothing, and faded posters of racing champions. At the back of the closet, smashed underneath a tote filled with encyclopedias, was a box marked "skraping" in purple marker.

Rayn grinned. She tugged the box from the mire and scraped dust off the top. ″Phew!″ She broke the seal around it with a silver letter opener.

Inside were clothes. She shook out a black shirt and held it up. It was too small for her now- her body had filled out a bit since her teenage years. Rayn's brows furrowed. Her old pants were wrapped in layers of electrical tape. They crackled as she shook them out. She remembered that the tape was important, but not why.

She held the pants at her hips. Also too small. ″Hmm.″

Beneath the clothing were her two skrape guns. She held them up, inspecting the bulging, clunky barrels. The faded gunmaker's signature design, two Ts outlining a face with blonde hair, barely caught the light. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?" Rayn placed them in their holsters and clipped them to her belt. "I am confident I'll get the hang of it quickly."

She frowned. She shifted from foot to foot, mentally going down her body, trying to figure out why she felt off balance. Skraping required an excellent sense of proprioception.

She stretched; her shoulders were tense, her elbows creaked a little, and her lower back hurt. All adult problems that came with the desk job. She bent to touch her toes.

Ah, yes. Her real gun. Her adult gun. The gun that shot bullets at people and generally made problems disappear. It was strapped to her right thigh, weighing her down ever so slightly on that side.

Rayn plucked the gun from its holster. "Hmm. One must be either very foolish or very brave to venture into the big world without this." She stared at it, thoughtfully, remembering her childhood sport devoid of defensive weaponry. And green eco, come to think of it. She strode to her desk and swapped the gun for a few little packets of green eco.

Digging into the bottom of the box, Rayn found the last necessary pieces for her outfit; gloves and shoes textured to grip onto anything vaguely horizontal. Rayn kicked off her heels and wiggled her toes. "Ah, glorious freedom." The shoes and gloves still fit. She rubbed her palms together. The ribbed, plasticized cloth made high pitched zipping noises. Rayn smiled.

Then, without a weapon, a guard, or a single ounce of alcohol in her bloodstream, Rayn, the crime queen of Kras, walked out into the night unseen, pulled the cover off a manhole, and jumped into the sewer.

Skraping was the art of clinging to the underside of the architecture, not giving a damn about anything above your head. It wasn't about being on top of the city, looking down at the ants below, bellowing insane laughter. Skraping was getting where no one wanted to bother you. It was real. It was street. It was below street. It was where stuffy mafia suits wouldn't go because it was filthy.

It was the last place in Kras that wasn't a city; the vast underwilderness. Here, there were no gangs, no rules, no racing, no taxes, and no paperwork.

Rayn chuckled. Of course, all that had sounded much more intense and awesome when she was younger. She no longer had something to rebel against- she was the man. She was the estate. She was the rooftops, the racetracks, the lifeblood, the drug lines. She was Kras City.

Everywhere, except here.

So here was where she was going.

The second she hit sewer level, she groaned. "Ugh." Rayn shuddered as the cold, filthy water soaked into her pants. "Now I remember what that tape was for." She sloshed forward a bit and reoriented herself with her mental map.

This sewer pipe was pretty small, as far as they went. It was only about as tall as she was and far from the sewer racetracks. The curved walls were riveted with hexagonal screws. Rayn followed them for a bit, slowly remembering all the different, telltale screw types and welding styles that helped to outline her mental map. She pursed her lips. "There you are," she said softly. "The blue 7." Nancy-No-Good's spray paint was faded now, but Rayn knew enough to get to where she wanted to go. She turned at a branch and headed south.

Quite a few of the original group had died falling into the water- Twisterina, Skrapin Skylar, credited for inventing the sport, and Nancy-No-Good cracked their skulls open on the way down. Gramm and Welded Tyrone, so named for his prosthetic leg and hip, were both gone now. Rayn had checked their records. Gang-related violence, of course. Funny how best friends ended up on opposite sides.

Bloody Mary Migraine, Tessy Train, and the Bomber had all left Kras City long ago. Rayn wondered, briefly, where they were now.

Her name had been Rayns It Pours, like the saying. RIP for short.

Rayn continued, turned a few times, and followed the sound of water falling. ″Finally! Blue 7.″

She stood, her hands anchored on the opposite walls of the pipe, and looked down. Nancy-No-Good's sign wasn't actually a blue 7, it was a stylized picture of the waterfall from this pipe. The water smacked into the ocean below and frothed fluorescent blue. Rayn smiled; it was brighter than she remembered. There were permanent plankton blooms around some of the waterfalls; tiny bioluminescent creatures fed on the pollutants pouring down from the city above. They glowed blue when disturbed.

Kras was built on a series of oil rigs. Plumbing had been woven around and through the rigs' support structures. Rayn stood in a maze of pipes and massive pillars. Maintenance catwalks swayed in the distance and ladders poked down from above, blinking with tiny red lights. Below, moonlight capped the oily wavelets with ghostly rainbows of grays and whites.

It stank of fish and oil, and all around her the pipes boomed with sloshing water.

Rayn inched to the edge of the pipe and pulled out one of her skrape guns. She targeted a nearby platform and squeezed the trigger. A ″sticky claw,″ a magnetic grappling hook, shot out and grabbed the ledge. Rayn took a deep breath and jumped out of blue 7's pipe.

She grinned. Air whipped across her face as she swung. She retracted the line as she went, until she was hanging just below the ledge, arms shaking with the strain. Rayn grabbed the platform and pulled herself up. Pebbles and scraps of metal fell and dappled the water below with blue rings. Rayn released the sticky claw and reeled it in. She looked around. The next ledge was much further, but if she took a running jump, glanced off _that_ pipe, ran across _that_ catwalk, and shot the gun, she could make it. The material of her gloves and soles allowed her to stick to surfaces just long enough to push off to the next target.

And that was the essence of skraping- getting from one side of this crazy jumbled mess to the other. Sometimes there were games. Capture the flag, relays, and tag. There were always surprises: sickly-smelling city runoff that burned their skin, suspicious, body-shaped packages roiling in the waves below, suitable for bouncing off of, and once, a major rig collapse. Rayn used to swing through this undercity wilderness with her friends until she was exhausted- sweat, grease, and worse clinging to her skin.

Rayn zipped around, marveling that the skrape guns still worked so well. It was Tessy Train, so bubbly in her pants waterproofed with pink electrical tape, who took Welded Tyrone's sticky claw invention and put it in a gun.

Yes, she could see her friends more clearly in her mind's eye now.

Tessy Train in her pink-taped outfits, laughing and putting her blonde hair back in a ponytail. The Bomber's smoke; she could follow his trail easily by the stink of cigars and matches.

Rayn – RIP - had been known for being the fast one. She was hard to catch, and her outfit let her blend into the background easily, but she was noisy. Skrapin' Skylar wasn't as fast, but he moved like a ghost. When playing capture the flag, the team opposite him was always given a handicap.

Rayn swung low, trailing her feet through the water. Then she pulled up hard on the line and landed in a knee-popping squat on the bottom ledge of one of the main rig pillars. Waves lapped at her feet. She stood up wobbily, laughing to herself at her lack of grace.

Twisterina could do the most impressive moves- she killed herself doing a combo series of backflips and line pulls across the underside of a ledge. Instead of pirouetting up to the next platform, she missed. Rayn had seen the whole thing from just too far. Twisterina's eyes had widened as she thrust her hand up to Nancy-No-Good, who was too slow to do a damn thing. Unable to pop her skrape gun in time, Twisterina screamed, bashed her head on the pipes below, and sank, thrashing, wreathed in neon blue water.

Rayn shivered. They had made a memorial of stacked rocks for the fallen. It was in this area. She should look for it, see if it was still standing-

″Hey boss lady!″

Rayn jumped and clapped her ear. Her earpiece- she had forgotten to take it out. Damn.

″What?″

″We got a problem. Shipment B is a little late and the You-Know-Whats are gettin' antsy.″

Rayn glanced around, mentally mapping her journey back to blue 7. ″Shipment B? Right. Bad news, that." She shot the skrape gun straight up and readied herself for a steady climb. "Send a couple of young men to the docks and see if they can't persuade our colleagues to, shall we say, hasten the delivery?"

"You got it, boss."

"I'll be in my office within the hour. Update me then." She clicked the earpiece off and pulled herself up. Rayn knew she would be sore tomorrow. She hadn't done this in many years. But the trip had been worth it. She grinned as she made her way back to blue 7, noting which of the old sewer lines would be good for business and which had deteriorated beyond repair. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted the stacked rock memorial and smiled. Rayn looked forward to incorporating her forgotten wilderness into Kras's future, very much so.

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**Funfact: the bioluminescent plankton in this story are based off a real organism, _Lingulodinium polyedrum_. Thanks for reading!**


End file.
